I think Microsoft has grown too large to deliver a coherent product, and has probably forgotten how to do so. Beyond a certain point, knowledge just completely breaks down, without near perfect knowledge management, senior developers leaving just leaves an understanding gap too big to ever fill. Windows has been around so long that people have had entire careers working on it and have retired and it’s all falling apart.

Individual teams still deliver decent stuff, dotnet, WSL all stuff pushing in the right direction… But no unified approach. The core windows teams seem paralyzed to implement real change. By all reports the code is now a spaghetti mess and no real endeavours to fix anything can get budget approval. Any budget that might exist to fix it is being redirected towards copilot projects